So I have created a new arcade website: http://www.wwgamesonline.com and I have been trying to hit the keyword "ww2 games". Over the past week I have been monitoring how its been doing in serps and it changes so much daily! One day it will be top of page 2, the next it will be page 4, and today it varied from 2-3. Why is it going up and down so much? I would think it would go up in a steady climb but it jumps up then back down and back up etc.
That is pretty normal for a new web site. Google is still calculating all of the different factors which they use to determine your overall ranking. Things usually settle after a month or two when you will see your natural ranking, then it's up to you to improve it.
Yes, a new website usually goes up and down a lot before its rankings become relatively stable. That's because Google keeps on deciding where to place the site and all. I remember that on my new websites whenever I'd check my google ranking, it would be different every day for most of the keywords, at least by one or two positions, but usually more.
alright I appreciated the information everyone. Should I slow down on link building until it settles? I heard that the first few weeks of your website is really important, is this a myth or can I improve my rankings just as easily a month down the road?
You need a sustainable strategy. Naturalness and randomness are important. Back link rates should be proportional to traffic and search rates. A site that suddenly gets 10,000 back links but has less than 20,000 searches or 50,000 hits per day probably looks unnatural.
That's what we call Google dance. Its usual for a website. Google keep on changing it's ranking as other competitors push.
Errhhh, actually, Google Dance was something else. Google dance used to be the hopping around of your rankings during the time when Google would update its index. That used to be before Caffeine (the new indexing system) was introduced. Before Caffeine, Google would update their index once a month and would begin with one data center, update it first, then move one to another data center, update it as well - the whole process was taking several days. So, during those days people would see different results sometimes, because they would be from different data centers. Today, Google Caffeine allows for ongoing updating of Google's index, so, there is basically no Google dance anymore.